About Me

Medical Robotics Magazine is the world's first and only commercial feature news magazine devoted to all aspect of the medical robotics industry- including robotic surgery, physical therapy robots, hospital orderlies, and other topics related to robotic medicine.
As a feature magazine, Medical Robotics features interviews, business news, conference coverage and editorials, as well as a generous portion of articles written by noteworthy robotics surgeons as well as clinical trials reports.
MR has been on-line since 2007, and first appeared in print in January of 2008 at the annual meeting of MIRA (the Minimally Invasive Robotics Association) in Rome, Italy. Medical Robotics Magazine is copyrighted, features a nascent Board of Editorial Advisors, and is indexed by the U.S. Library of Congress.
All contents (c) 2011 John J. Otrompke, JD
Contact: John J. Otrompke, JD
John_Otrompke@yahoo.com
646-730-0179

The new products are proving popular. “We have seen a lot of interest among the robotic community in our standard sensors and in the starter kits,” Hood said. Tekscan sensors are already used in medical applications such as mammogram models, dental applications, and infusion pumps.

The new robot under development would use the Tekscan sensors as part of a pneumatic balloon-based tacticity system, according to Dr. Martin Culjat, PhD, adjunct professor and research director at the Center for Advanced Surgical and Interventional Technology at UCLA.

The Center, which is a customer of Tekscan and was founded in 2004, has already designed a haptic system for use in lower-limb prosthetics, using the sensors, Culjat said. “We’ve been able to incorporate a sensor on the prosthetic feet of amputees, which transmits the force to the limbs,” he explained.

“There aren’t many sensors that are very thin, and light-weight with appropriate pressure ranges for tactile sensitivity. There are proposed solutions, but this is a really challenging problem,” he explained.

The haptic system under development at UCLA may be applicable to any surgical robot, although the researchers there are working specifically with the da Vinci. Furthermore, the Center is also building its own robot, called the Laprobot, Culjat added.

“We literally dice the sensors up ourselves, and carefully place them on to the big grasper. Our actuator has six elements for a much better response to the human sensory system,” according to Culjat.